A widely used tool used by medical professionals for performing relatively simple diagnostic tasks is the stethoscope, which is used to listen to a variety of internal bodily functions through the skin of a human or animal patient. The conventional stethoscope has been used for hundreds of years for assisting the medical professional in providing diagnostics for a wide range of illnesses. A significant problem when using a conventional stethoscope is that the sound captured by the stethoscope is not actively amplified, only conveyed via flexible or stiff tubular material to the ears of the medical professional, which means that very subtle sounds within the body cannot be identified using the stethoscope in real time.
One way of solving this problem is through the invention of the electronic digital stethoscope, which is capable of amplifying the sound levels from the body and processing the sound for optimal listening, such that a medical professional is capable of listening to sounds, which are hardly conceivable using a conventional stethoscope. The traditional digital stethoscope and the conventional stethoscope both have the same drawback, which is that a medical professional is required to listen to the sounds collected by the stethoscope in real time, and make a judgment based on what he hears. However, recent digital stethoscopes have been provided with the capability to store a few seconds of recorded sound, such that the medical professional may choose to listen again to the sounds stored in the digital stethoscope.
US Patent Application No. US 2007/0276270 attempts to solve this problem by describing a health care monitoring system, which describes one or more wireless nodes forming a wireless mesh network, where the mesh network communicates with a base station in the form of a computer server, where the nodes transmit patient data to the base station to detect a heart attack or a stroke attack.
One described embodiment of the aforementioned system describes collection of wireless nodes having different functions where one wireless node is an electronic stethoscope where heart sounds are transmitted from the wireless node to a base station, using sounds recorded from the wrist of the patient. The collection of wireless nodes is required to communicate continuously with the base station when in range. A serious drawback to this health care monitoring system is that the wireless node has to communicate the signals to a base station to be capable of performing any analyzing tasks. This means that the user or a health care professional is required to communicate with the base station to obtain or access any information about the recorded patient data. Furthermore, as the wireless communication is continuously with the base station when in range, the power consumption is significant, as the collection of node would have to check continuously if the base station is in range and receive a confirmation thereof in addition to the continuous data transmission of the recorded patient data.
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a continuously increasing threat to the public health in western society, where tobacco smoking, increased stress, lack of exercise, fat saturated diets, obesity, etc. are reported to be significant direct or indirect risk factors for the development of blockages in the coronary arteries, resulting in coronary artery disease. Currently, the present methods for assisting in the diagnostics and/or diagnosis of CAD are expensive and require complicated equipment, such as an electrocardiogram, nuclear scanning, angiography or coronary angiography, CAT scans and MRI scans. Furthermore, these methods require that the subject spend a considerable amount of time in hospital laboratories.
The execution of the previously mentioned methods may be very expensive, which means that the methods are rarely used for preventive diagnostics and subjects are usually subjected to CAD diagnostics subsequent to physical problems indicating the presence of CAD, such as chest pains, etc.
Therefore, there is a need for an improvement in monitoring the physical signs of CAD, using acoustic signals from the human or animal body, where the acoustic signals are selectively or continuously recorded and/or transmitted to a peripheral device. The selective transmission means that normal signals would not be transmitted while abnormal signals could trigger a transmission.